


Creatures and Cages

by mumblefox



Series: Across, Around, and Upside Down [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Character Study, M/M, Pre-Kerberos Mission, asexual Keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:06:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9152767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblefox/pseuds/mumblefox
Summary: First, there was Keith. Then there was Keith and Shiro. Then there was Kerberos, and everything that came after.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Happy 2017, folks!! It's time for some updates before season two hits us all, and I've written you some angsty nonsense for once featuring our favourite feral desert child (my irreverent working title for this fic was 'keith's sadness errands'). This will be part one of my Voltron fic series.

 

When Keith first arrived at the Garrison, he was a creature of teeth.

No one knew where he’d come from. They didn’t like his wildness, didn’t like that there were questions on his enlistment form he couldn’t  - or wouldn’t - answer. But he took every test they gave him and devoured it, tore it to pieces. He flew through basic with clenched teeth, with bloodied fingernails, dragging himself up when walking couldn’t get him there.

He bit every hand of friendship that was extended to him. He wasn’t at the Garrison to make friends. He’d gone because there was a caged bird in his chest, beating ceaselessly towards the stars, and this was the only way he knew to get closer to them.

On his third week, he snuck into the sim after hours and stayed until the morning shift almost caught him. He made it through classes the next day, through combat training, using sheer force of will, lashing himself through the exhaustion while the caged bird sang, exultant.

He’d flown. He was so close.

When his brain burned with the need to do more, he gave up sleep. In the night, he hooked his toes under his bed frame and did sit-ups, beat his face on the floor with push-ups, shadow-boxed until the whole room was the colour of bruises, and he could hit the showers and get breakfast. It meant he would spend the day rough-edged and exhausted, but it also meant he would sleep like a dead man the next night.

It was the only way he could sleep through the clenched-fist yearning of the night. When the stars were out above him, they never let him rest.

They called. He reached for them, knowing this was as close as he had ever been, and that every day, he got closer. Not fast enough. Not fast enough. They called, and he did all he could to answer.

That’s all he was: an answer to a question he couldn’t even frame. In the night, dark below but stars above, he would say it sounded a lot like _when._

On his third time sneaking into the sim, he broke the previous record. He could have wiped the session, hid his tracks. He didn’t. The officers found it the next day, found out whose access code was used, called him from his military theory class to grill him about it. They accused him of cheating, and he could only laugh. He didn’t have to cheat. He’d been born to this.

When they put him back in the sim, he broke his own record.

After that, he got shuffled into different classes. They moved him up, put him in advanced pilot training. Fast-tracked him. The disinterest of his classmates quickly became hostility.

He didn’t care. Whatever it was that dragged at him, that pulled him on, it had never been stronger.

The word his instructors used was undisciplined. His classmates called him a basketcase. They warned him: freaks like you don’t get to pilot. You’re unstable. Untrustworthy. Selfish. A pilot has to be a leader. A pilot has to be a little more human than you are.

Nothing they said was worth paying attention to. The stars were calling, and their voices were louder than those of his classmates.

And then, in an attempt to train some calm into him, he'd been paired with Shiro.

He’d never paid attention to whose score he’d beaten in the sim. It didn’t matter - all that mattered was beating it. But Shiro was a pillar of competency, a center of calm capability in the midst of Keith's whirling dervish longing, that Keith fell in love with instantly. The way a storm loves a coast, the way a river loves a tumbling fall.

The way a bird loves to land on safe branches.

Keith had never trusted safety. It didn't last. No one in his life had ever stayed. But now, for the first time, when Keith snapped at Shiro's overture of friendship, someone recognized it as a warning rather than an attempt to wound.

Shiro stayed. Through lunch; through the class they now shared; through rec time, when they both hit the gym and Shiro, with patience and easy, laughing grace, had put Keith on the mat so many times that the bruises stayed for days.

Their fellow students had cheered to see him put in his place, but Shiro waved them off, and Keith picked himself up and hurled himself back in.

Keith was a creature of teeth, snarling and hungry. And so was Shiro, but only when he chose to be. He saw it when Shiro spent his rec time two days in a row interrogating their fellow students to find a stolen bracelet, and then shaming the thief into giving it back. He saw it when an instructor berated a student in front of the class and Shiro leapt to their defence. And he saw it the first time Shiro snuck them out after hours, when he drove them both into the desert so they could see the stars. Neither of them had ever been very good at sleeping, but this, for them, was almost the same thing. As though looking at their ambition could dull its edges, could smother its flame, could let them rest easy in their skins. With the sky above them, they were reminded that there was nothing, really, between them and it.

Only gravity. Only air. Keith felt like if he reached hard enough, those would drop away and he would just fall straight into the sky. This was the gnawed edge of his hunger, and when he looked over, he saw it in Shiro, too. A jolt of recognition, of belonging. Of not having to do this alone, for the first time in his life.  

Someone had known what the fuck they were doing when they paired him with Shiro. There was never a time when Shiro lectured him or berated him or even made a point to emphasize teachable moments. But Keith learned anyway. He found himself settling. Everything in his life got easier when he stood next to Shiro.

Maybe he made Shiro better, too. Both of them were bad at keeping track of how often they ate, at how often they slept; whatever their ambition was made of, it called louder than simple biological need did. But it was easier to notice bad habits in the other than in themselves. Shiro reminded Keith to eat, snuck food out of the mess hall whenever Keith was in the gym through dinner, and Keith came to pull Shiro out of the sim when he was there later than normal, losing track of time in the need to fly. They started guarding each other's health, made a deal that they would allow themselves to be pushed around a little, when it was good for them.

They respected each other's granted authority by never using it unless it was necessary. It meant that if Keith told Shiro to sleep, it was an extreme circumstance, and Shiro was grounded until he did. He had to tell his instructors he was unwell and take the day off, something he'd never given himself permission to do before.

Keith was the same. Usually, he survived on a diet of what anyone else might consider rocket fuel: energy drinks, candy bars, dry cereal, chips. He liked to eat straight out of the box, and didn't much care if it was healthy or not. If it would keep him alive another day, he ate it. But if Shiro told him to go find food, it meant he wasn't allowed to do anything else until he did. No homework, no working out, no sleeping, until he went and ate a vegetable or two.

Both of them fought too hard to fight all the time. This was a concession they allowed themselves to make.

There was power in that. In keeping your teeth for when they were needed. Keith didn’t understand it quite yet, but he could copy it.

For the first time in his life, the caged bird was content to wait.

When sleep escaped them, they returned to the desert, to the ruined shack Shiro had found in his first year. They joked about fixing it up, adding to it: a loft, an outhouse, a generator room, so that it would glow in the desert emptiness, a jewel of warmth in the endless dark.

Make of it a place to return to. A place to stay.

Then Kerberos happened.

It happened like this: Shiro applied for a mission that he had no hope of getting, knowing it would look good on his record. Ambition always did. He and Keith installed new windows on the shack, since the desert had long since blown out the old ones, and Keith thought about how nice it would be to kiss him here, in this place they were building together.

It happened like this: Shiro got called in for an interview, and left it dazed and grinning and hopeful. They found an old couch and built a room for a generator while the mission coordinators deliberated and made their decision.

And Shiro got the job.

It happened like this: one day, Shiro came charging into Keith's room while he was working on an assignment. He was shouting his news, wearing a smile big enough to outshine the sun, and Keith had risen to his feet, seized him by the face, and kissed him.

And without hesitating at all, Shiro had pulled him in and kissed him back, laughing and radiant with joy.

"We should have been doing that for months," he said when they broke apart.

"Well, you outrank me." Keith's fingers dragged over the rank insignia on his shoulders. "We aren't allowed to do this at all."

It was an out, offered without judgement, without expectation. A chance to step back from this.

Shiro's smile was crooked, and he rubbed his thumb over the corner of Keith's mouth. No part of him was backing down from this, and Keith felt it like sparks being struck into life inside his brain. "Sounds like it's time you put some effort into your career."

Keith tipped his face and his eyebrows up. "When have I ever cared about what I'm _allowed_ to do?"

"I was hoping that was the case," Shiro said, and kissed him again.

It happened like this: they kept their secret; they kept sneaking out; they kept fixing up the shack. Whatever it was between them, it was easy. Simply an aligning of orbits, an expression of gravity. Two parts of the same hurricane. The calm center and the swirling wind don't exist without each other, after all.

They talked about fucking - even though Shiro flinched when he called it that, preferring softer terms like _sex_ and _love_. But it had never been about affection, for Keith. It had only ever been a verb. Whatever they called it, Keith had never been particularly interested - did not want it, did not benefit from it - and Shiro didn't mind. What they had was more than friendship. More than either of them, with their hearts in the stars, had ever thought they'd have. It was enough.

It happened like this: Shiro went through mission prep, went through the media blitz.

Went into pre-launch quarantine, and went into space.

They traded video messages; it wasn't often the free time on their schedules aligned and, with Shiro travelling through the gravitational inconsistencies of space, it would have been impossible to coordinate anyway. Messages were enough, would have to be enough until Shiro came home. Keith liked them, in a way, because it was nice to wake up to find one waiting, and it was nice to be able to replay them. He’d never been the sort of person to collect keepsakes, but he’d never had a reason to be sentimental before, either.

The scientists they’d sent with Shiro were good people, and Shiro seemed to enjoy their company; by the third week, they and Shiro were very good friends, and Keith was glad to see them getting along, glad to see that Shiro had people with him he could rely on, people who kept him company. Keith's face and voice became so familiar to the Holts that they started popping into the frame when Shiro was recording to say hello. Keith liked them. If he couldn’t be with Shiro, they were the next best thing.

The day they landed safely on Kerberos, the world celebrated. Keith's pride floated him right out of his skin; he spent the day walking around with a smile on his face, and one of his flight instructors thought he was on drugs and sent him back to his dorm to sleep it off.

It didn't last. Nothing in his life ever had. He'd forgotten that. Somehow, Shiro had made him forget that.

It happened like this: one day, he walked into the rec room and everyone was standing there, silent. Backs turned. Watching.

And Shiro's picture was on the news.

Keith only heard pieces: Kerberos, failure, pilot error. Missing. Presumed dead.

They were saying Shiro was dead, and it was his own fault.

And they were wrong.

Keith had run sims with him for a year. Shiro didn’t make mistakes. Keith got higher scores, but still failed one in ten missions. Shiro had never failed, not even once. He hadn’t failed on Kerberos, either, emergency takeoff or no. Keith knew.

Still, the caged bird in his chest was lying on the floor of his lungs, choking him.

He went back to his bunk. He pulled the curtain, sat there with his back to the metal, and stared at the wall for a very long time.

Then he remembered the vidcom.

He crawled over to his terminal. The last message he’d sent was still there in the log, unopened.

Could be a problem with Shiro's terminal, with the power source. Maybe Shiro was busy. Nothing about an unopened message was damning, in itself. There was no reason that little Message Delivered! icon should twist his gut the way it did.

He was being stupid. He keyed the Call button, waited while it went unanswered. Nothing damning there, either. They could be outside the ship; they could be sleeping. When the video light blinked on for the message, Keith smiled into it, a reflex. Then it faded.

He realized, at that instant, he didn’t know what to say. There was a part of him that had never really considered that Shiro wouldn’t answer.

The light pulsed. Recording.

“Hey,” he began. The word tripped out of him, awkward. He swallowed against the surge of emotion that rose to strangle him, soldiered on. “I’m, uh, I’m just checking in. I heard some pretty weird news today, and I don’t...I don’t see how it could be true, so I just. Wanted to hear from you. Please, I know you’re busy, just...please let me know you’re okay.”

His hand hovered over the End Call button. It took him a moment to realize why the message felt unfinished: he still needed to sign off, needed to say goodbye.

He wouldn’t. He jabbed the button, and the light went off.

Message Delivered! said the icon. He pushed his chair onto its back legs, hands folded behind his head, and closed his eyes.

Lingered there, on the edge of falling.

* * *

 

He didn’t go to class that day, or the next. On the third day, a counsellor showed up, and he slammed the door on them. He didn’t need counselling because Shiro wasn’t dead. Keith was okay. He was just trying to figure out what had actually happened, and why they were lying about it being his fault.

There was a memorial service that third day, which he didn't attend. He filed a request to see the mission logs, and was denied.

He spent two more days lurking on the Garrison's message boards, asking for help with a personal tech project. Someone responded anonymously; they'd have to customize some code, but it had worked for them before. If he was looking for information on the Kerberos mission, all they wanted in payment was for him to share his findings.

Keith accepted. They said they'd be in touch.

He hadn't heard from Shiro in more than a week.

The calm center in him was dissolving.

* * *

 

In his next message, two days later, he tried to keep his tone light. He did pretty well, he thought, at least at the start.

“Alright, it’s been a few days. I gotta admit you’re starting to freak me out, man. I know you haven’t gotten my messages, so you don’t know you’re freaking me out, and you wouldn’t leave me hanging anyway, and this message is just...more of me worrying into the void.” Desperate. Rein it in. He took a deep breath, let it out slow.

“I’m hoping your terminal is broken, and when you fix it you’ll get all these at once and probably laugh about how I’m tearing myself to pieces over nothing, but…” He dropped his head out of frame for a moment. He buried a hand in his hair and looked up out of the corner of his eye.

“Everyone down here has given up on you. I haven’t, okay? I know you didn’t crash. If I have to fly out to Kerberos and fix your damn terminal myself, I’m gonna do it, and I’m gonna kick your ass while I’m there.”

Did he just try for a joke? Fuck, it sounded sad.

He signed off, put in token appearances in his classes so they wouldn't kick him out just yet, and waited for something to change.

Someone came along and cleaned out Shiro's room. All his stuff was shipped back to his family, but it reminded Keith of Shiro's gym locker. It was where he'd always stashed a change of clothes for sneaking out; Keith nabbed it all before the next round of inspections and stashed everything in a barely-used bank of storage bins in one of the outbuildings.

When he found Shiro, when he came back, it would be nice for him to have some of his stuff handy.

He wasn't giving up on him. One day, Shiro would come home.

But weeks passed. Keith abandoned his class work, then his classrooms. He was pulled aside by an officer, one day, who warned him that they taught discipline for a reason, and that grief could only stretch it so far. That he wouldn’t be allowed to continue wallowing, and that he was on track to be kicked out entirely.

Keith knew all of that. The officer’s reprimand was so far beneath his area of concern that he only barely consented to hear it; the look he returned her was so devoid of interest that she hustled off soon after, glancing back at him with an expression he was far too familiar with: the classic what’s-wrong-with-that-guy, the jeepers-what-a-creep.

That didn’t matter, either. She was Garrison, and he’d be leaving it soon. None of their opinions of him would matter. The Garrison, like everything else in his life, had never had a chance of being in it forever.

He started returning to the shack in the desert, beginning his research, getting the equipment ready. Setting himself up.

The ratio of time he spent at the Garrison and time he spent away began to skew. They still hadn’t kicked him out, though, and it took him a while to notice, and then a while to understand why.

He figured it out pretty quick when the Garrison started to hound him. They floated the idea to him through his classmates, through strangers approaching him while he ate in the mess, through messages on his public terminal that he started to delete without opening. They were trying to ease him back into it, then they started to nag him back into it.

What it came down to was this: Keith was their bright star, and they needed him to get back to work. They wanted to hold him up, to erase Shiro's failure with Keith's success.

When they finally wrangled him into a disciplinary hearing, that’s what they told him. Not in so many words - they liked to say things like _bright future_ and _professional pride_ and _redemption_ and _doing credit to Shiro’s tutelage._ That last one pissed him off most. For the first time in ages, Keith showed his teeth. His answer got him placed on immediate suspension and earned him a punishment detail.

It was time to go. Past time, probably. There was nothing left for him here.

But there was one last message he had to send, first.

He booted up the vidcom. The log showed his previous messages sitting in a tidy stack at the top, unopened. He keyed the call button, imagined it ringing into the echoing emptiness of the ship, reaching into every corner and finding metal and dust and nothing.

The video light blinked on. Recording. Keith took a shaky breath.

He didn't know what to say.

"Hi, Shiro. This is, uh...this is gonna be my last message."

He could do this. All he had to do was get to the point and push through it.

“I'm leaving the Garrison. I don't want to, but I think I have to. Weird to think that I'd rather stay, isn't it? Bet you weren't expecting that." He tried to smile, couldn't. He felt like he hadn't smiled in weeks, and his face just didn't remember how. "Shiro...I need you to say something. I haven’t given up on you. I won’t. I’m gonna find out what happened. I’m gonna find you. But it would be nice to...it would be helpful if…”

He looked away, closed his eyes against the little recording light. “I miss you so much,” he said, and the admission cracked something open in him, a crevice which tears were rising through. He pressed a thumb, hard, into the inside corner of his eye. It did about as much good as a screen door on a starship. “I don’t know what to do, Takashi. I’m going to pieces and I can’t stop it and they’re going to kick me out of the Garrison. And I just can’t _care_ because you’re not here, and I can’t do this without you.”

He sniffed, tipped his head back. Aimed a watery smile at the ceiling. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize it sooner. You left when I was just figuring out how much you meant to me.”

He stared at the ceiling. If he didn’t look back at the camera, he could trick himself into being empty again, into thinking this was just a conversation he was having with himself. It was the only way he could keep it together, and he still needed a long moment of sitting there in silence before he could press the tears out of his voice.

“I’m gonna go back to the desert. You remember our shack? It's looking pretty liveable now, and I'm...I’m gonna figure out what’s going on out there, what’s been calling me. I should have done it a long time ago, but now I think...I need the distraction.”

He closed his eyes, pressed it all back, but couldn’t stop himself - he’d been sick over these words for too long, and now they were pushing their way out of him. “Shiro, I’m sorry. I said I wouldn’t give up on you, but I don’t know what to do. You’re gone, and I -” He clapped a hand over his mouth, but the tide took him anyway. He was swept under, a sudden surge of emotion that obliterated him, and he welcomed it.

There was nothing left but only this: goodbye. He could make it through one goodbye.

“Maybe I am giving up on you,” he said, voice cracking down the middle. The camera gazed back at him, impassive. He thought of this video sitting on the ship, New Message! icon blinking until the power ran out, until the hull cracked, until solar radiation fried the entire machine, and this went with it. Unopened. Unseen.

Better that way. He took a shaking breath.

“I want you to know - you taught me, and you made me a better version of myself, and I’m gonna try not to let you down.” He swallowed, thick. “But I don’t think I’ll see you again.” There were so many things he wanted to say crowding into his throat, so many things he was too proud to admit, even to himself, until grief burned his pride out of him. He didn’t get to say them now; they were mistakes he’d just have to live with.

He settled. The tide that took him under had receded, and there was only rock beneath, scraped bare. He looked straight into the camera, into the little red light.

“Bye, Takashi,” he said quietly, and felt it in his chest like the roots of the summer’s last flower being pulled from the earth.

The light turned off. Message Delivered! said the icon. Keith pushed to his feet, was about to turn the terminal off for good, when a notification caught his eye.

New Message!

His heart jumped into his throat, so quickly it felt like almost puking. He stabbed the notification with a finger, jarring his bones, but the hope swelled in him so quickly he barely felt it - there’s no one else it could be, no one in the universe who had this contact number, except -

Two people.

The message was anonymous. There was a file attached. For the first time since asking for it, he remembered the student who was building him the code cracker.

He almost deleted it unopened. It had been - how long? More than a week.

He couldn’t do this again. He’d already said goodbye. It was over.

But Shiro wouldn’t let Keith’s name live on in disgrace if their positions were reversed. If there was more to know, if there was a way to prove Shiro wasn’t responsible, it was the least Keith could do for him.

So he took the code and he broke into the General’s office and he found information he couldn’t make any sense of.

The logs of the mission - the last diagnostics the ship had sent - showed that the ship had landed successfully on Kerberos. There was no record of a takeoff, emergency or otherwise.

The ship’s computer was still pinging updates.

He opened the most recent file, checked it over.

 **Atmospheric data** : correlation: Kerberos.

 **Ship data** : status: functional.

 **Ship data** : status: maintenance and repairs required. Debris build-up: outer stabilizers. Attention needed. Debris build-up: solar panels. Attention needed. Debris -

He clicked over to another folder.

 **Crew data** : location: Shirogane, Takashi: unknown. Exited ship sensor range 480 hours ago.

 **Crew data** : location: Holt, Matthew: unknown. Exited ship sensor range 480 hours ago.

 **Protocol** : distress signal: sent in absentia 472 hours ago.

 **Protocol** : distress signal: remote shutdown: activated 471 hours ago.

Keith did some quick math in his head. Twenty days, give or take. Predating the announcement. He worked backwards in the folder.

 **Crew data** : physical data: Shirogane, Takashi: vitals: most recent: 480 hours ago. Elevated heart rate. Elevated respiration. Erratic neurological activity. Hormonal shift detected: correlation: fear response.

 **Crew data** : physical data: Shirogane, Takashi: local communications log: most recent: 480 hours ago. Play recording?

Keith’s finger hovered over the button.

He couldn’t do this.

Think: what was the last thing Shiro had said to him?

The memory came back with searing clarity. Keith’s nose squashed sideways, face pressed into Shiro’s shoulder, bundled tight to his chest. Shiro’s arms around him, squeezing and then letting go. The rumble of his voice echoing in Keith’s bones. There was a smile, just for him, the lopsided, easy grin of utter confidence that only Keith recognized as bare ambition.

“By the time I get back, they’ll be putting you in the pilot’s seat. I know it.”

“Without you to keep me in line? They’ll kick me out in a week.”

“Keith.” Shiro gripped his shoulder, and Keith’s breath fluttered in his chest. A bird’s wings, a soaring heart. Shiro smiled, his true smile, his proudest, and Keith wanted to crawl inside that moment and die there. “Come on. You’re gonna be great.”

That moment was separated from this one by a gulf that might as well span years.  

The log blinked at him: Play?

Correlation: fear response.

He couldn’t do it. He was too selfish. He’d rather have his last memory of Shiro, untarnished, full of light, than the truth of his last moments.

Correlation: fear. Keith couldn’t remember if he’d ever heard Shiro be truly scared. He knew he didn’t want to.

A happy memory for the cost of a blind eye. This was one thing he could live with not knowing. He closed the file, backed everything up onto a separate drive, and left.

He didn’t bother to cover his tracks. Let them know someone had been here, that someone knew. By the time they found out, he’d be long gone.

Into the desert. Into the night.

Into a new mystery that he had no idea how to solve.

The Kerberos crew was MIA. That didn’t mean dead.

Correlation: fear.

He uploaded the data to his anonymous friend and packed everything he owned into a backpack. It fit comfortably. He didn't have much.

Without anywhere else to go, he followed the caged bird in his chest. It felt less like a flutter that pushed at him and more like a swelling force, as though the bird had gotten too big for its cage, or as though it wasn’t a bird any longer at all. As though Shiro had taken Keith’s frantic energy and channelled it, transformed it. Made him better.

Whatever it was that pulled him now, it was pulling for the desert, and Keith went.

He wasn't expecting how hard it would be to go back to their shack for good.

The knowledge grew slowly in him, then bloomed all at once, a fly trap opening its teeth inside his brain. He didn’t notice it creeping up on him.

He'd thought he was okay.

But the first night in the desert, once he’d jammed all his socks under the door to keep the sand out - once he settled into the quiet, into the foreign feeling of utter nothingness on all sides, and the night filled its lungs around him - he had a confused thought that Shiro should be there, and that brought a lurch of emotion that took him down: a sudden, devastating emptiness in his understanding of the world. He was a hand reaching for a railing that wasn’t there and tipping, all at once, over the precipice.

Gone.

Either lost or dead, Shiro was gone.

There was nowhere to go with the emotion that rushed up to swallow him, then.

He found himself outside, gasping under the stars, the biting cold of the night air burning a hole in his lungs as he folded around that one word. Gone. Shiro, gone. Not a message away, not in a room down the hall. Not in the school, in the town, on the planet.

Shiro, somewhere in the impossible vastness of space.

Or lying somewhere, dead as dust, whispered the practical part of his brain. Maybe some equipment exploded and he was amongst the wreckage, torn to shreds. Craters in his face from the shrapnel.

Keith sunk to his knees in the sand, fingers digging hard into his gut, trying to stifle the pain that burned there. He didn’t scream, didn’t cry. He just let it devour him, let it get as bad as it had to, lived each second of it without flinching.

And when it ran its course, left him scoured bare and achingly empty, he got to his feet.

He went inside, and he got back to work.

* * *

 

Over the next weeks, he explored. The pull of the desert never stopped, even when he tried to sleep. Sometimes, he went out into the cold with his blanket and sat in the chair and stared at the stars until the constellations had tracked far enough across the sky that his exhaustion could carry him to sleep. Sometimes, he paced around, let his anger and grief boil inside him, let it vent however it wanted. Sometimes, he took the bike out into the desert as though he’d just keep going.

The nothingness around him swallowed the nothingness within him. In the desert, under the great overturned bowl of the sky, cliffs so far in the distance they vanished into the horizon, he took comfort in his cosmic insignificance. The stars didn’t care if he dropped out, if he disappeared, if he found Shiro or if he died trying. Nothing he did would ever matter. He didn’t matter.

It was okay to feel this wretched because it didn’t matter to anyone but him. If he wanted to cling to what could have been, who was there to call him on it?

He found cave paintings and old stories in old books; he collected old stories from old mouths when he went into town for food and fresh power cells. The machines he could get his hands on couldn’t measure the pull he felt, but he didn’t stop trying.

Time stopped meaning anything when the only measure of its passage was the sun rising and then falling again. He stopped to consider, once, that it had been months since he left the Garrison. It was a fact with zero value attached, neither negative nor positive knowledge. Just a fact. He’d been missing for months, and it seemed that nobody had looked for him, either.

He wondered how many other people had disappeared like this. Not maliciously, just incidentally. Too busy to bother checking in with the world.

He wondered how many people had gone crazy, on their own like this. He knew it happened, knew humans weren’t built to be solitary. Maybe it didn’t matter, really. The urgent tug of whatever waited in the desert meant he never really felt alone.

It called him. Not once, in all the time he was in the desert, did it stop calling him.

Then he started to put together his findings, his notes, correlating the stars with a timeline and seeing math come out, seeing it resolve into a language he could only barely speak, but which pointed towards an arrival.

The pull was becoming more urgent as time passed. Keith found coordinates in the numbers, found a date in the stars.

When the time came, he got on the bike and went.

He got there exactly in time to see the pod burning through the atmosphere, knowing this would be it: whatever was in that pod was the answer to the question he’d been chasing this whole time. Whatever was in there would change everything.

When he broke in, he was looking for a databank of some kind, a computer. Information. Answers.

What he found inside was Shiro.

Reality rearranged itself, bent in a curve under his feet. Warped.

When he touched Shiro’s face, turned it towards him, knew for sure - he was real, he was here, he was _alive_ \- there was not a force in the galaxy that could have stopped Keith from getting him to safety.

And then Lance happened. Then all of them happened.

There was not a force in the galaxy that could have stopped him, and they didn't try.

His time at the Garrison had gone full circle: when he’d first arrived, Keith had been a creature of teeth. Defensive, scrappy. Ragged. Eyes to the sky. Frustrated, wanting everything faster, putting every challenge in the dirt behind him and still not stopping. A force of nature.

Now, out of the Garrison once more, he was the same.

A lifetime ago, he'd been called unstable, undisciplined, selfish. Maybe a pilot couldn't be those things, but that's not what he was anymore. Now, it didn't matter.

What mattered was this: Shiro on the back of the bike as they were chased through the night. Escaping. Flying.

The caged bird singing, exultant.

Maybe this is what his life would be: cycles. Finding Shiro, losing him, finding him again. The storm in his skin either raging out of control or turned to a purpose.

Calm center or no, Keith would be with him. He’d started to give up on him once, and he never would again.

Maybe there would be a moment of rest for them, one day. Maybe there would be time to figure out what, exactly, they were to each other. For now, there was only the desert, calling. There were the stars, staring down. There were three strangers, crowded into the shack he and Shiro had reclaimed together.

And Shiro, a year and eight months after the Kerberos mission ended in failure, opened his eyes and came home at last.

 


End file.
